A THANKSGIVING CONNECTION
It’s Thanksgiving Day – have you hugged a farmer yet?
Actually, we need to do a lot more than hug those family farmers who bring us such a bounty of good food, for they’ve become endangered species in the Brave New World of industrialized, conglomeratized, and globalized food production that our policy makers are pushing. Thanks to such policies, those who till the soil are productive, efficient … and broke!
They’re being forced out of business by corporate profiteers. The price of everything from seeds to crop loans keeps going up, while the price farmers are paid for their commodities keeps going down. Few consumers know it, but very little of what you and I spend on food goes to the farmer. Out of each dollar we spend, farmers now get only 19 cents, with monopolistic middlemen like ADM, Cargill, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Philip Morris, Tyson, and Wal-Mart grabbing an ever-larger share.
But the good news is that we don’t have to buy in to the self-serving manipulative system of the monopolists. Instead, there’s a growing mass movement among consumers, small farmers, entrepreneurs, communities, and others to take back control of our food economy and food culture by focusing on locally grown foods. Farmers’ markets, for example, are flourishing, with some 2,800 of them across America, involving nearly 20,000 farmers selling in all kinds of neighborhoods to hundreds of thousands of consumers. There are also community garden projects, farm stands, and other direct farmer-to-consumer marketing outlets, as well as more and more grocers and restaurants proudly offering food fresh off local farms.
Check out these connections for everything from free-range turkey to organic tomatoes. Buying locally means you can get better food at cheaper prices, but it also means that the money you spend stays in your community and supports a revitalized family farm economy.
To connect to markets near you, go to this Web site: www.localharvest.org.
HAPPINESS
Let’s talk about that “inalienable right” that the Powers That Be don’t want us talking about: the pursuit of happiness.
This basic human right, proclaimed by the founders on July 4, 1776, gets short shrift today. It’s not taught in schools as a worthy goal in life, it’s not mentioned by the mass media, it’s not posed as a national objective by vote-seeking politicians, and it is deliberately discouraged by corporate bosses who constantly demand more hours from us with less pay (as one T-shirt puts it: “Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do”).
Instead, the prevailing culture insists that you derive your “happiness” from staying hitched to the constant plow of work, thus making some money so you can buy a car, watch TV, go to Disneyland. They’ve perverted the language, shifting the debate from real happiness to possessions – and that is leaving a very big hole in our lives.
It’s also leaving a gaping hole in our country, for it teaches that happiness is a function of individual attainment, not a community or national purpose. Merely measuring productivity and prosperity leaves most Americans today empty, for these crude measures ignore such essential human needs as public involvement, work satisfaction, good health, free time, environmental balance, spirituality … connectedness to the common good. These are the true elements of happiness, both for individuals and the country.
Let’s put the pursuit of happiness back into our political discussions. Even the straight-laced New York Times has noted this need, recently editorializing that: “The world looks … as if it is being devoured by some grievous species – partly because of narrow economic assumptions that govern the behavior of corporations and nations. … A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy – not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers – might begin to reshape those assumptions [to better] the lives we lead and the world we live in.”
This article appears in November 25 • 2005.